The following articles can be found on
librisblog.photoshelter.com.
The first article discusses how managing your digital assets can save athletic departments money, and the second artcile on why you should avoid a "messy media library." Libris by Photoshelter is a CoSIDA corporate partner.
Forbe Magazine
ran this article in February, referencing CoSIDA and Libris by PhotoShelter
See online: How Visual Asset Management Helps College Sports Departments Increase Revenues, by Kristin Triford via
librisblog.photoshelter.com
The 5 Risks of a Messy Media Library, by Kristin Triford via
librisblog.photoshelter.com
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How Visual Asset Management Helps College Sports Departments Increase Revenue
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The 5 Risks of a Messy Media Library
How Visual Asset Management Helps College Sports Departrments Increase Revenue
Universities are losing thousands of dollars every year because they aren’t prioritizing visual asset management. In fact, they stand to gain $30,000 annually, according to our survey with the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA).
Universities face three common challenges when it comes to visual asset management. Overcoming them isn’t easy, but with so much to gain, it’s worth a good old college try.
Challenge # 1: An unmanageable volume of photos and videos
60% of university athletics departments have an image database of more than 750GB. A robust collection of sports images can help universities tell compelling stories across platforms. You can live Tweet game highlights. Beam fan photos to the jumbotron. Post updates on the website homepage. Join the conversation on Instagram.
In a marketplace where visuals are increasingly gaining importance, having a huge collection of photos and videos isn’t a problem – it’s a necessity. The problem comes with managing a constantly growing library. 75% of sports information directors admit to having a storage system that is difficult to access.
To make sure the best images are published while they’re still newsworthy, you have to have a way to sort through the flood of images, flag the best ones, and share them quickly. Taking the time to keep an organized media library and tag media with relevant keywords can help you save time when you’re on a distribution deadline.
Challenge #2: Lack of sharing photos and videos among departments
A number of university departments produce and share sports photos and videos – from photo services to athletics to public relations. But these departments are missing opportunities to work together for two reasons, 1) because they’re not communicating with each other, and 2) because they don’t have an infrastructure that encourages them to share visual assets.
More than half of our survey respondents say they maintain in-house image storage on CDs, DVDs, and hard drives. When content is stored locally in one department, another department has no way of knowing what photos and videos might be available to them. Asking your colleagues for access and figuring out how to get images from another department’s hard drive to your computer across campus is a time-consuming hassle.
Having a system that cuts through the red tape dividing departments, like a cloud-based system with controlled permissions, can help everyone reduce costs and improve messaging. Everyone wins when you share visual assets, because every department with a hand in communications has a common goal – enhancing the university’s brand.
Challenge #3: A small budget for photography services
Many universities, especially smaller ones, have dwindling budgets for photography services. Sports information directors (SIDs) have to make tough decisions about how to allocate their limited funds.
For example, new equipment might rank higher on your wishlist than a visual asset management system. But without a system to help you control the large volume of visual assets (challenge #1) and share media with your colleagues (challenge #2), you are missing an opportunity to get the most return from your photos and videos.
Of course, every college department wants a bigger budget, and it’s not a matter of waving a magic wand. But as more research indicates that you must get visual to get attention, universities will be pressured to shift more funding to visual communications.
You can also boost your department’s budget by creating a university photo store. 25% of our respondents say they want to sell NCAA-permissible image content. If you use an NCAA compliant sales platform, you can sell sports imagery and supplement your small campus budget.
The Solution
Improving visual asset management systems help universities overcome these three challenges. It reduces repetitive activities like searching and resizing image assets. Plus, it encourages sharing among departments and speeds up the process of requesting photos and videos. Streamlining workflow cuts up to 50 hours of work per month for staff members in a typical university sports communications department.
Universities that focus on the quality of their sports imagery as well as the systems used to create and share that imagery have an incredible opportunity to increase revenues in today’s visual age.
The Five Risks of a Messy Media Library
A robust media library can help your brand have a big impact, especially if it’s well organized.
The majority of senior marketers say visual assets are key to telling their brand story. But only 27% of those people have a centralized way to organize those assets, according to our recent survey with the CMO Council. That means the importance of making sure an organization’s media library is well organized is often overlooked.
Not only is the disarray adding to your headache, it’s also costing you time, money and more.
1. You’re duplicating costs.
Departments aren’t sharing and repurposing content, and in the end, everyone loses. Let’s say someone on your admin team hired a professional photographer to snap a photo of your new building, but didn’t mention it to anyone. The public relations team might do the same and – BAM! – your organization paid for the same thing twice.
2. Photos and videos are getting lost in the shuffle.
When you don’t have a common system in place, your teams are storing photos in email inboxes and local drives. This can cause a huge problem when people delete emails, forget where they stored something, or leave the company. Remember that graphic designer who quit last month? What happened to all of the images stored on her computer?
3. You’re not keeping up with the speed of social media.
You’re missing opportunities to engage your audience because any time your topic is trending or news is breaking, it takes hours to find that perfect photo to Tweet. The conversation moves on without you. (We all know how it feels – you’re about to throw out the perfect joke. Then, someone jumps in ahead of you and steers the conversation off track! Now, your joke is irrelevant and you’re left wishing you had moved faster.)
4. Unknown usage rights block productivity.
If you don’t have an easy way to keep track of when you’re allowed to use an image and when you’re not, you’re stuck with a difficult choice. You could 1) take the risk and publish it anyway or 2) not publish it at all. Which do you choose? Trick question: the answer is neither! Get organized instead. If you consistently add metadata to your images noting when you can and can’t use them, you’ll avoid lawsuits and missed opportunities.
5. Your imagery is inconsistent.
Your customers should get a familiar feeling every time they interact with your brand. You don’t want your teams to publish photos and videos that all have a different look and feel. If you have a system in place to identify on-brand images in your library, your customers will get a cohesive and compelling story from all angles.
Here’s the good news. Senior marketers who have gotten organized say it pays off.